Question 1

How does the artist use Tint, Shade and Tone to expression different emotions or effects?

Accepted Answer

There is no definite, overarching answer to your question. In fact, not all artists even use tints, shades, and tones with any consistency in their works. Really, the best answer would be to say that there are a variety of ways - color plays a huge role in determining the emotions of the Abstract Expressionist period, so it really depends. A certain artist may use a shade to bring across a feeling of retrospection, while a different artist may use that exact same shade to represent buoyancy. At the same time, Jackson Pollock (for example) never even used such techniques in his greatest works. It all depends on the work, the context, and the artist, but you can be sure that those listed art techniques do, and have been used to, represent emotions - it just varies from each artist and his/her work to the next.

Keep your eyes and ears open to each video that you watch, and take note of when the speaker mentions such terms and notice in what relation they are being used; that is the best way to learn about the variety that can be had with those techniques - tints, shades, and tones.

Keep your eyes and ears open to each video that you watch, and take note of when the speaker mentions such terms and notice in what relation they are being used; that is the best way to learn about the variety that can be had with those techniques - tints, shades, and tones.

Question 2

If you darken 1 color with black and then put an the same amount of white in the dark color as you put black in the original wouldn't you get back to the original color with no change to it?

Accepted Answer

Try it. You'll find that you don't have the original color, but a duller version of it. If you add grey to anything, it gets greyer. Paint isn't like Photoshop.

Question 3

Is it possible to mix colors to get either black or white?

Accepted Answer

No
At most you can mix many colors into one big muddy dark color, but it wont be Black(TM)

Question 4

Using words like tint, shade, and tone don't determine actual color though, right? You can't just say, "Oh, I used a blue shade to paint this sky," or whatever, because that could apply to any number of colors, as various amounts of black is added to the original. Or, is there a predetermined amount of additional black, white, or gray, which means that any tint of blue will be the same as another artist's? I'm sorry if that doesn't make sense.

Accepted Answer

No, your first assumption is right. Adding more white or black or both will give you different tints, shades, and tones. Artists/Art classes often practice with this by making list type things of different tints and shades:
http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/webpages/akirkebye/imageGallery/ColorValue.bmp

Question 5

The "shade" (0:20), can be mixed with another colors instead of black? And the "tone" (0:30) can be mixed with its opposite color + white to make grey? because black isn't used in traditional oil painting

Accepted Answer

Hi, I'm here to say that both this video and Popa George are wrong, and I'm surprised this video still exists on the site.

A tint is a color plus white.
A tone is a color plus black.
A shade is a color plus it's complimentary, which when mixed just right, creates grey.

Traditional painters do use black, but not always, and not all of them. A famous example is the Greek painter Appelles who used white, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and black. This is known as Appelles' palette, and has been used historically by Rembrandt, and an almost infinite number of other old masters. The idea is, since the black is the coolest color on the palette, it functions like blue.

Here's a video that shows how complimentary colors mix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfAZt3O0sLY

Question 6

So say if you wanted to make a painting depicting a scary sort of atmosphere, could you lay down a shade as the first basic gesso of the canvas (First layer)?

Accepted Answer

I think that largely depends on the type of paint you use. If you're using a tempera paint, it would be a great idea since you build 'up' such paintings. Watercolors, doing so would be a bad idea because the dar colors need to go last because the light colors won't show up over the dark ones. Oil paints it could work, but colors are blended so much on the canvass that I don't know how an original layer works, really (I've never painted with oils).

Question 7

so the differences between these 3 terms isn't much?

Accepted Answer

In a way you are correct. This is a very simplistic explanation, with slight misinformation, for three out of four terms (the other being hue) which are quite useful in the world of paint. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tint-tone-shade.svg  However in the grand scheme of mixing paint and making colors, these three/four aspects are quite crucial on the subject of color theory and painting. http://www.colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory In my humble opinion.

Special topics in art history

Course: Special topics in art history > Unit 2

Art Terms in Action: Tint, Shade, and Tone

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